Data illegally harvested from 50 million Facebook users, report

3 min

Cambridge Analytica, a big data company focused on political and commercial advertisement campaigns, paid for illegally obtained personal information of 50 million Facebook users, according to the New York Times and London Observer.

The leading news outlets have revealed that all of this was allegedly done for the 2014 mid-term elections as Cambridge Analytica was the recipient of a $15 million investment from a Republican donor Robert Mercer.

The sources such as Facebook documents and statements of former employees which have been retrieved by The Guardian, reveals that over 50 million Facebook profiles were affected, and $1 million was spent to do so.

Source: google/out.com

According to a former data scientist of Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie,

“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.”

Late February, amid a UK investigation into counterfeit news, the organization denied it at any point worked for the Brexit camp, regardless of cases by the star Brexit battle it had looked for the exhortation of Cambridge Analytica.

‘Not all information was erased’

Source: Google/hl.co.uk

Facebook said in an announcement on Friday that it had turned out to be mindful in 2015 and strategies has been damaged.

“When we learned of this infringement in 2015, we expelled his application from Facebook and requested confirmations from Kogan and all gatherings he had offered information to that the data had been crushed,” the web-based social networking organization said.

“Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all ensured to us that they wrecked the information,” it included.

In any case, as per the daily papers’ examination, duplicates of the substantial swaths of information are professedly still accessible as indicated by The New York Times.

As of now, Facebook has suspended the accounts of SCL/Cambridge Analytica, Wylie and Kogan from Facebook. The company’s VP and General Counsel Paul Grewal states,

“We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all — and take action against all offending parties.”

It remains to be seen what sort of users data was actually accessed and what Facebook is going to do about it.

Search

Search for:

Disclaimer

One of the earliest activities we engaged in when we first got into astronomy is the same one we like to show our children just as soon as their excitement about the night sky begins to surface.
That is the fun of finding constellations.